I can’t live without my news. But you know what? Not everyone is like me. In fact, some very well-adjusted people can be quite happy with a casual approach to newsfeeds and just subscribe to a handful of sources that interest them. Pulse News Reader and its iPhone cousin, Pulse News Mini were designed for such people. I didn’t think I’d find much value in it, but I was wrong, Pulse is surprisingly fun!

I think the words of the developer captures the Pulse experience perfectly, ”While a traditional RSS reader is usually about consuming as much content as possible, Pulse is all about leisurely enjoying your daily news with a cup of coffee.”

You could grab an iPhone 4 for a good dent in your month’s rent, then give out for the 3 year Apple Guarantee and BAM! the nervous sweat from a first date destroys your iPhone and Apple won’t touch it because it simply covers their glass, not yours. Well, for the price of Apple’s iPhone Protection Plan, you could have two years of coverage for all normal out of warrantee failures such as drops, spills, leaks, cracks, etc. Protect iPhone 4less is a FREE download and covers ALL iPhone models. Should you do something bad to your baby, SquareTrade will cover the cost of shipping to and from their repair depot.

There is a catch though: you have to have an American iPhone. You can’t be some Australian bloke with an iPhone and want to sneak into this clever deal. No, your phone will have to be bought in America either at an Apple Store or say… from Ebay. For Canadians who got an iPhone from the USA, this SquareTrade’s offer takes especial advantage of the longest unprotected border in the world.

Summary: Protect iPhone 4less costs 99$, covers all iPhone models and covers all normal out of warrantee failures. It is also currently rated at 4 1/2 stars at the American iTunes store.

Update: Use the code APPRV when purchasing the warranty to receive $5 off, making it $94 for the 2 year coverage.

Back in late 2007 I ran across a free public alpha of a Mac program called Things from a small German company called Cultured Code. People were raving about it because unlike most To-Do list productivity apps at the time, which were complex and tedious to use, Things was designed to provide an intuitive interface for quickly entering and managing tasks such that the process did not get in the way of getting work done.

During the summer of 2008, Things for iPhone ($9.99) was among the first apps in the App Store and it quickly became one of its most successful productivity apps. When the iPad was released last April, Cultured Code was ready with Things for iPad ($19.99) from day one. The developers at Cultured Code should be applauded for not straying from their original design goals as they’ve moved Things into the mobile world.

A recent trip to Canada changed my life in many ways. Firstly, it severed the ties I had to a silly corporate decision; and secondly, it put an iPad into my hands. Thanks to Apple’s “magical” device, I’ve been able to take gigabytes and gigabytes of photos (though I’ve uploaded only a few to my flickr account), sort them, and offload them later to my lappy, that foul tool that I no longer have to carry around. Along the way, I picked up two interesting iPhone/iPod touch apps: The Photographer’s Ephemeris and Golden Hour. Both tools do the same basic thing: tell where in the sky the sun is; it’s how they do them that is the interesting bit.

I’m sure many of you have seen the videos that showed up last year when Adobe was announcing their CS5 suite and the truly magical content aware fill feature! The amazing tool that did everything, from finishing your homework to cleaning up garbage on your lawn blew my mind with the endless possibilities. No wonder that when NeoMobili offered me to review their CaPix application for the iPhone, one advertised to have the same possibilities, I was eager, though a bit skeptical.

One of the recent announcements that shocked the US iPhone community was the abolishment of unlimited data plans for all new iPhone subscribers. And while non-US users have been stuck with data capped with various severity (i.e. only 250 MB for about $20 monthly in Russia) this notion is new to the denizens of the New World. In these trying times Vladislav Kharchev is offering Download Meter to help you track your data usage without having to rely on the cellphone carrier data (we DON’T actually know if they’re telling the truth, right?).

Reading has increasingly become a dying pastime in the current age of TV and Podcasting. Almost the only real place I can find the opportunity to enjoy it is on the commute to work and back. How great it is to enjoy a good long article from the comfort of my iDevice. And here I often run into a problem – no data coverage. Frustrated at the greedy mobile operators, stealing my only chance of broadening my horizons I set out on a quest to find an answer. And I did – Instapaper Pro!

For many users the iPhone has become not just a phone, or a gaming platform, but a tool they use in the daily business life as well. Apps like Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite make it perfectly possible to create and edit business-grade documents and share them via a multitude of means from local Wi-Fi to cloud storage. But what is you need a hard copy? Well, there’s an app for that!

I love taking pictures on my iPhone. Even though it’s only an older 3G it’s always with me and the quality is decent enough that I can even print them out. But once I get the photos on the device itself there’s little I can do with them but view them. I can’t even rotate them for god’s sake! In these trying times, the only place to turn to is one of the thousands of photo-editing apps at the AppStore. And today I’m turning to Photo Infinity.